Abstract
This article reconstructs multiple enactments of overweight bodies in residential child care by analysing ethnographic field notes. The account links in with current tendencies in childhood studies to reach a more material and relational understanding of children’s agency. Examining concepts of embodiment as discussed in science and technology studies and phenomenology, the article offers an approach to childhood studies which connects the corporeal and agency. It shows how different enactments of children’s bodies and food produce different forms of agency.
Keywords
For some time, there have been tendencies in childhood studies to revise the theoretical foundations on which research operates. Some discern a ‘new wave of childhood studies’ (Ryan, 2011), which is just beginning to gain momentum, while others assume the existence of a long-standing but largely unnoticed ‘infra-paradigm’ (Oswell, 2016). Regardless of these different interpretations, there is a general consensus that childhood studies must (re)connect with current discussions on social theory. The prevailing paradigm of childhood studies is thought to be too focused on an individualistic concept of agency, and therefore defined by the politically dominated search for authentic children’s voices. Starting from this criticism, there has been a shift from a substantialist and isolated view of children’s agency towards more connected and related forms of agency (Eßer, 2016a): this involves the materiality and performativity of agency as well as the ambiguity of children’s voices (Komulainen, 2007; Kraftl, 2013; Spyrou, 2016).
The proponents of the ‘new wave’ see these efforts to conceptualize agency outside an individual capacity for action as located within the framework of a broader relational turn in the social sciences (Dépelteau, 2013). In this context, the notion of childhood as a social construction – central for childhood studies – has been expanded into the idea of childhood as a general construction, which is not limited to the social actions of human actors, but is considerably more heterogeneous, encompassing biological, material or political elements (Lee and Motzkau, 2011; Ryan, 2011). These ‘new’ approaches seek to overcome the dichotomy between agency and structure on which the original paradigm is based. Childhoods – as well as adulthoods – are conceptualized as assemblages, hybrids, networks, rhizomes and so forth (Johansson, 2011; Turmel, 2008; Woodyer, 2008). Research focuses on transitive, dynamic and messy realities.
This article picks up this thread and applies it to the question of food and children’s bodies. The social significance of food has been a recurring topic in childhood studies in recent years (Kohli et al., 2010; Punch and McIntosh, 2014). I want to explore this question in terms of the above-mentioned relational approaches in childhood studies, focusing on both the social and the material significance of food: how are children’s bodies constituted in relation to food, and what sort of children’s agency emerges from this? This perspective will be developed using the example of the way obesity is dealt with in residential care settings. This is an instructive analytical case, insofar as agency can be shown here within a web of biopolitics with wider social effects, locally practiced dietary norms and subjective food preferences.
The article thus pursues two objectives. The first is to show, on a theoretical and methodological level, how relational concepts can be made productive for empirical research in childhood studies – as the discussion about the ‘new wave’ has so far been more theoretical than empirical. This is linked with the argument that these approaches should be expanded to include sensory ethnography (Pink, 2015) and phenomenological concepts of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 2012 [1945]). The second, content-related focus is on the different ways the diet and bodies of overweight children are enacted in residential child care.
The first section uses approaches from science and technology studies and phenomenology to develop an a-humanist concept of the body, which will form the basis for the subsequent analysis. The next section briefly describes the study, in a Scottish residential care unit, and the ethnographic approach taken. The empirical section of the article analyses three different enactments of an overweight body and then discusses how these different enactments oscillate between, on one hand, ‘biopedagogies’ focused on slimness and, on the other hand, a sociality based on food. The article concludes by advocating an understanding of agency and biopolitics that goes beyond the nature/culture divide.
Theoretical resources: An a-humanist concept of the body
As Prout (2000) complained more than 15 years ago, and Lupton (2013: 37) has recently repeated, childhood studies has largely neglected the body. Scholars in the field wanted to concentrate on the agency of children as social and competent actors, and thus left the body – as a ‘natural’ component – to the human sciences. From this perspective, the child’s body belonged to the sphere of adult-centred developmental theories and biopolitics, which were supposed to be counteracted by the deconstruction of childhood in childhood studies (Burman, 1994; Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers, 1992). Now, however, increasing efforts are being made to overcome this division (Kraftl, 2013; Lee and Motzkau, 2011; Oswell, 2016; Ryan, 2011).
This gives rise to a challenge: to develop a concept of the body which can overcome the traditional separation between body and mind – as expressed, for example, in Descartes’ famous postulate ‘I think, therefore I am’ (‘cogito ergo sum’). The latter is typical of the modern understanding of the body, insofar as it prioritizes intellect over matter, and conceives of humans as a kind of ‘ghost in the machine’ (Crossley, 2001: 63). The development of concepts beyond a dichotomy of rational mind versus body as matter is in line with the fundamental attempt to overcome the dichotomies that dominate childhood studies: between culture and nature, agency and structure, or subject and object. Lee (2008) therefore advocates an ‘a-humanist’ approach: an ‘a-humanist strategy is no longer a social constructionism but a generalized constructionism […] that discusses childhood as an emergent property of interactions between persons, discourses, technologies, objects, bodies, etc.’ (p. 59).
An a-humanist understanding of this kind has been explicitly related to the body in the context of science and technology studies (for a similar attempt to link Science and Technology Studies and Childhood Studies with respect to food, cf. Kontopodis, 2014). It is targeted at the idea that bodies are substances which could exist outside the reality in which they are brought forth. ‘As part of our daily practices, we […] do (our) bodies. In practice we enact them’ (Mol and Law, 2004: 45). This premise opposes the Cartesian idea that the body must always be a whole, clearly demarcated from the world around it – but it does not mean, conversely, that bodies are always deconstructed or fragmented: (Mol and Law, 2004: 57). Instead, the argument continues, the body displays a complex configuration. Mol (2002) refers to this as ‘the body multiple’. This is not about what makes the body ‘more than’ nature but about how these different natural and physical aspects are enacted. These are enactments that involve a number of different human and non-human actors. For childhood studies, this raises a question that needs to be answered empirically: how children’s bodies are enacted in different ways in different networks and what agency they are accorded here. For researchers, this means a crucial shift in emphasis: they are no longer restricted to either, on one hand, describing how children’s bodies, due to an anthropologically given weakness or need for development, require the care of others or, on the other hand, negating this corporeality in order to focus on the actor. In other words, agency can be negotiated even in conditions of physical dependency and vulnerability.
At the same time, there has been much criticism of the inability of science and technology studies to relate the body to its physical experience (for example Braidotti, 2013: 103). Here, phenomenological approaches, such as those following the tradition of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of corporeity, are a useful supplement. One example for childhood studies is Tahhan’s (2008) argument that ‘the body is not an entity’ (p. 41), but a relation between others and the self. It is a relation that is not based on any separation between body and subject, as Tahhan (2008) establishes with the example of rocking a child to sleep: ‘When the teacher is in relation to the child, the body loses its finite sense of containment and helps to create an intimacy between the adult and child that is inclusive and meaningful’ (p. 45). In the corporeal connection, it becomes unclear at what point one body ends and the other begins. In contrast to science and technology studies, Tahhan (2008) assumes the existence of corporeal experiences and a bodily ‘belonging in the world’ (p. 53). Her study, as well as other phenomenological studies, points to a sensory area in which reality is experienced, along with the desires associated with this, as well as to an imagined area of wishes and longings. In keeping with this, Lee (2008: 70) also argues that terms such as ‘affect’ and ‘affection’ should not be left to psychology, but brought back into the social sciences – without being ontologized or substantialized.
Study and methods: Food in residential care from an ethnographic perspective
Both aspects, the body that has to be ‘done’ in the sense of enactments and the corporeal, sensory, and emotional experience connected to this, will play a central role in the analysis of my field notes. These were made in the context of a study on the material and corporeal agency of children and young people in residential care in Scotland. This is a continuation of my ethnography of different residential child care units in Germany. These insights are therefore based on a long research process. The article, however, concentrates on a participant observation study in a residential child care unit, which I carried out in the framework of a 1-year research visit to Scotland in 2014 and 2015. The purpose of this focus is to do justice to the logic of a specific field, in keeping with the basic principles of ethnographic research (Amann and Hirschauer, 1997).
When it comes to the formal description of the residential unit, however, the barest of outlines must suffice so as to preserve the anonymity promised to the unit and its young residents. At the time of my observation, there were five young people aged between 11 and 17 living in Annandale, the unit that I visited, and a team of 12 staff members working there. I spent a total of 20 days with the young people and staff, generally spending around 8 hours in Annandale at different times of day.
Both the research question and the length of time I spent at the residential unit during the fieldwork phase made it necessary to give thorough consideration to ethical aspects of the study. My main point of orientation was the British Sociological Association’s statement of ethical practice. Both before and during the study, I spent time with the young people and staff, discussing the questions to be investigated and the research design, and securing their consent at all stages of the research process. The project was also positively evaluated beforehand, in separate ethics procedures, by both the university committee responsible for my research (School of Applied Social Science Research Ethics Committee) and the local council responsible for the care unit.
There have already been isolated studies investigating the issue of children in care and food; these have emphasized the high social significance of shared mealtimes, on one hand, and the individual significance of food, on the other (Emond et al., 2014; Kohli et al., 2010; Punch and McIntosh, 2014). This article takes these as its starting point, but chooses a different emphasis. Instead of reflecting on what, from a social perspective, makes food ‘more than’ and ‘different to’ mere nutrition (Punch and McIntosh, 2014: 76), it focuses on the ‘social’ importance of the connection between body and food: the taste and texture of food as qualities that are available to sensory experience, the changes to the body brought about by food and the manner in which people use food to define their corporeal position in the world.
Ethnography is a research strategy which is particularly helpful when it comes to analysing this question of the materiality and corporeality of food. As Pink (2015) emphasizes, ethnographic research offers the opportunity to do justice to the different senses, which
often leads us to the normally not spoken, the invisible and the unexpected – those things that people do not perhaps necessarily think it would be worth mentioning, or things that tend to be felt or sensed rather than spoken about. (p. 53)
This study pursued the somewhat more general aim of reconstructing the corporeality and materiality of children’s agency in residential care (Eßer, 2017). Here, ethnography presented itself as a valuable research strategy for examining the concrete everyday practices through which local cultures are established, culturally and materially. In the course of the fieldwork, the aspect of the overweight child’s body emerged as one of several which could be used to answer this question. The central element of the data gathering process was the writing of field notes (Emerson et al., 2011). Here, particular importance was attached to recording the physical aspects of action, and the researcher’s own emotional and sensory responses during the field visit, in order to include the phenomenological dimension of the social. The data were then evaluated by means of sequential analysis, a recommended method for the analysis of ethnographic data (Maiwald, 2005).
Analysis: Multiple enactments of the overweight body
Working from the assumption that bodies are multiple entities, the following section will discuss how, in Annandale, bodies are enacted in different ways in relation to food. In line with the analytical ethnographic strategy of following people, things, metaphors and so on (Marcus, 1995), the analysis will focus on a particular child, and will investigate different translations of her body in the unit. Sarah is an 11-year-old girl who has only recently come to Annandale. To me as an observer, she seems relatively tall for her age and somewhat overweight. In everyday life, she is repeatedly teased about her weight by other young people. The care workers in the unit intervene in response to this bullying, but they themselves are concerned by Sarah’s weight and her eating behaviour, which they describe as unrestrained. The decision is therefore made to keep a food diary with or for Sarah as a preliminary countermeasure.
The food diary: Controlled intake of nutrition
In order to understand why there is an individual food diary for Sarah, we have to understand the specific culture of the unit. In various other units where I have carried out participant observations in the last few years, there was a tendency to introduce general nutritional guidelines for all the children rather than individual measures. In one unit, for example, the children were only allowed to drink one glass of fruit juice per day because of the hidden sugar, or they were allowed no more than three slices of bread at dinner. These rules were introduced partly because of the obesity of individual children, but applied equally to all children, with the justification that a healthy diet would not do anyone any harm. In Annandale, however, the children are supposed to be able to eat what they want and can help themselves to food from the fridge at any time. Furthermore, the meal plan had been revised shortly before the beginning of my observations because the young people had found it too heavy on vegetables and too healthy and had instead demanded more chips and fast food. The care workers in the unit were at pains to encourage participation from the young people, and food was supposed to be one such area of shared decision-making. This made it all the more difficult to deal with the fact that Sarah, in the eyes of the care workers, could not control her food intake herself. The food diary was supposed to help her achieve this.
The following scene, taken directly from my field notes, occurred after I had sat in the unit’s office and seen a care worker noting in a folder what Sarah had eaten for lunch:
Later I ask Megan about this, and she shows me the food diary. She explains to me that Sarah eats a lot of snacks between meals, and that the point of the diary is to get a better handle on this. She says that in the evening they sit down with Sarah and talk to her about what she might like to change about her eating behaviour. The point isn’t to set rules for her, Megan adds quickly. She explains that it has to do with participation, if Sarah can say, for example, that instead of this yoghurt here – here she points with her pen to a yoghurt recorded in the diary – she could perhaps have eaten an apple […] Megan goes on to explain that Sarah may be only eleven, but that bad eating habits become fixed early in life. (2 April 2015)
The pre-printed form for the diary has been downloaded from a commercial website run by a dietician to help people lose weight. There is a table for every calendar day, with one column for the time, one for the food eaten at this time, then the amount and finally the calories, which are added up at the end of the table. A separate table records ‘physical activities’ and the calories burned here. So it is essentially about counting calories: calorie intake versus output. In this dietary model, food is a fuel that is burned. The food diary is meant to encourage Sarah to see food as calories, to keep an eye on the energy it supplies, and thus to independently monitor and control her food intake: However this "independence" was not yet a given state in practice:
After Megan has shown me the diary, I ask whether I can photograph a page of it. Megan says yes. But when she sees which page I have opened it to, she suddenly hesitates. She obviously finds the page embarrassing, and explains that this was a really bad day. (2 April 2016)
Sarah ate an extremely large amount, and Megan sees herself and the other staff (‘us’) as responsible: a colleague made sandwiches for the whole group, and then did not pay attention, and Sarah ended up eating all the sandwiches herself. In the corresponding column, five sandwiches are listed for breakfast alone. Thus, there is a contradiction between Sarah as a rational subject who, in the evening, thinks about whether she could have had an apple instead of a yoghurt and Sarah as a subject who is completely unable to control herself, who eats whatever is available, and therefore needs to be watched by staff members. Both realities coexist. Megan is worried about this photo because she sees herself and her colleagues as being responsible for what Sarah eats.
Unrestrained eating as a secret pleasure
The body as a machine that consumes energy and stores excess calories as fat, a machine that needs to be controlled by a rational mind, thus constitutes one food-related enactment of Sarah’s body in the residential unit. Another enactment can be identified when we look at Sarah’s actual eating practices.
Here, it becomes apparent that Sarah’s interactions with food often strike me, as an ethnographer, as a form of incorporation or absorption: in my field notes, the boundary between her and the food becomes blurred. I describe, for example, how, when getting herself something to eat after school, she leans so far into the fridge that she seems to almost disappear:
Sarah says hello to me and asks in passing, over her shoulder, how I am. I say ‘fine’ and ask how she is, as she opens the fridge door. But her answer is swallowed up in the depths of the fridge into which she speaks. (25 March 2016)
On another occasion, a care worker reports that she has had a confrontation with Sarah because she had been ‘in the fridge’ (field notes, 7 April 2015). Another typical scene occurs when we attend a film club with some of the young people and staff. Next to us is a coffee machine where individual cups of different kinds of coffee can be made. Sarah goes around and asks each of us what sort of coffee we want and then makes them for us individually. While Sarah is busy with the coffee machine, I am sitting nearby:
I see Sarah take a single portion of evaporated milk out of the drawer under the coffee machine. She quickly turns her head from left to right, to check that no staff member is looking – my presence doesn’t bother her. Then she hastily drinks up the milk. She does this by holding the little container in both fists and raising it to her mouth, while simultaneously bending her head down. She then sips up the milk through a little hole that she has made in the top of the packet, like a squirrel gnawing on a nut. After she has emptied the first container, she quickly throws it away and takes a second one, which she does the same thing with. (24 March 2016)
The hasty looking around before drinking suggests that there is something forbidden and oppositional about the action that follows. I am certain that these single-serving packs of evaporated milk never appeared in a food diary. They were ‘off the record’. But there is also something pleasurable about them. Here, Sarah is satisfying an impulsive craving to consume food – a craving that does not satisfy hunger and is inextricably linked with the manner in which she consumes this food. While I watch her, I feel a slight unease, imagining the sweetish, fatty taste of the evaporated milk, with its viscous, somewhat oily consistency. This has to do with my own socialization around food and also with cultural norms that I have internalized in this context. Sarah breaks with the convention that evaporated milk is a concentrate to be mixed into coffee and derives her own pleasure from secretly drinking up the little packets. The way she does this, ‘like a squirrel’, is also contrary to the rules of cultivated Western eating: instead of assuming an upright stance and bringing the food up to her mouth, she bends her head down, thus creating – within the public space where the machine stands – an intimate space between herself and the container of milk.
This sequence offers a good example of something that can also be seen in a number of other observations made during my field visit: Sarah loves to interact with food in a messy, hasty way, blurring the clear boundaries which so-called cultivated eating practices normally draw between the food and those eating it. Thus, for example, she brings her mouth to the food, instead of the other way around, and repeatedly drops food on herself and her clothes. And when, as described in the above section, the care worker makes sandwiches for the whole group and does not pay attention, Sarah incorporates them all.
Food as a gift
A third form of enactment has already become apparent in the introduction to the previous sequence. Here, Sarah went up to each person in the group and provided everyone with their preferred coffee drink. When Sarah consumes the food she finds around her quickly and seemingly without restraint, this is just one of a number of possible enactments in relation to food. Another enactment involves sharing and giving away food. In this and in many other cases, Sarah relates to others through food, using it to demonstrate care and affection. For example, she left sweets for one of the members of staff in his tray in the office and then asked him several times whether he had looked in his tray and discovered the present (field notes, 2 April 2015). In another case, I myself benefited from Sarah’s generosity. At the beginning of my fieldwork phase, she gave me a tour of the neighbourhood and showed me, among other things, a small kiosk. Here, Sarah took two ice creams out of the freezer, paid for them and put one of them into my hand without saying anything. On the way back, the two of us ate the ice cream as we walked – crunchy chocolate shell, sweet, soft vanilla ice cream in the middle. Sarah told me that this was her absolute favourite ice cream that she was sharing with me. A few days later at dinner, she told a care worker, speaking in my direction, ‘I’m his favourite. I bought him ice cream last week’ (field notes, 2 April 2015).
This can also be interpreted as a form of body enactment because food is a special kind of gift, which can be experienced physically. It signals intimacy and care, by allowing the receiver to absorb or assimilate something that comes from the hand of the giver. Sarah further heightens the significance of this by sharing something – sweet treats – that means a great deal to her and creating a shared taste experience by eating together.
Discussion: Food and the body between biopedagogies and sociality
The different enactments described above are all equally real. All of them ‘are’ Sarah’s body in relation to food: both the nutrition table and the girl who guzzles evaporated milk or gives people ice cream. But they create very different realities.
The food diary is, in the terms of science and technology studies, a non-human actor, which works by recording the intake of food, something that would otherwise be ephemeral, and by translating the food itself into energy (Latour, 2005) – that is, into calories – which make the body fat if their intake is not restricted. The efforts to reduce Sarah’s weight can be seen as part of an obesity panic which has been spreading for some years. Here, society’s aesthetic ideals of slimness combine with a medical discourse, warning us about the individual health risks and the enormous economic costs of an epidemic of overweight (Gard, 2009: 32). Based on Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’, Wright coins the term ‘biopedagogies’ to describe the potential effect of the discourse about the obesity epidemic at the level of individual lifestyles (Kontopodis, 2014; Wright, 2009: 8).
The food diary collaborates in a construction of Sarah’s body within the framework of biopedagogies. In the first instance, it is intended to make Sarah look at her body and her diet in a particular way, referred to by Mol (2013) as ‘food as fuel’ (p. 383). The diary makes Sarah, as a rationally acting subject, aware of how many calories she is consuming so that she can limit her food intake accordingly. While the body’s first instinct – in this reality – would be to eat without restraint, the tool helps the controlling but weak mind to restrain the body appropriately. When Megan notes that Sarah is supposed to use the diary as a basis for reflecting on her diet, she is alluding to this aspect of self-regulation. Sarah is expected to learn to make a ‘distinction between “homeostatic eating” (allowing a body to stay “the same”) and “hedonistic eating” (that all too easily seduces a body to eat in excess)’ (Mol, 2013: 383).
It is clear, however, that the care workers themselves are emotionally involved when it comes to Sarah’s eating behaviour: this was confirmed by Megan’s embarrassed reaction when I wanted to photograph the ‘wrong’ page in the diary. If Sarah really did have sole responsibility for her eating behaviour, then the staff member would not be ‘to blame’ for her opulent breakfast, nor would the other staff member have to be mortified, on her behalf, that Sarah has eaten so many sandwiches. While in the past neglect was primarily defined by insufficient provision of food, today – at least in the so-called ‘Western’ sphere – an excessive supply of overly energy-rich food seems to have been identified as the main problem. This is a form of neglect for which parents – or in this case care workers – are seen as having prime responsibility (Friedman, 2015: 14). In addition to their caring about Sarah, they therefore have a very personal interest in controlling Sarah’s food intake, and the food diary seems to help with this – even if it simultaneously highlights their own ‘lapses’ and failures.
The manner in which Sarah consumes food in everyday life often does not follow the ‘ideal’ of homeostatic stability, but instead the ‘dangerous’ principle of hedonistic enjoyment (Mol, 2013: 383). While the food diary encourages a rational mind to control a pleasure-seeking body, Sarah is not clearly divided into these two parts, if we look at the actual eating practices she engages in. As became particularly clear from the example of the evaporated milk, Sarah cultivates a style of eating – particularly during her numerous snacks – which runs counter to this kind of dualistic separation of body and mind, blurring rather than reinforcing the boundary between inside and out. In this context, Van de Prot and Mol differentiate between ‘comer’ and ‘chupar’ 1 as two different ways of eating, which they observed in Brazil, but which can be readily be transferred to our case. Although there was no direct equivalent to the distinction between ‘comer’ and ‘chupar’ in the native codes of the field participants, the analytical differentiation addressed here is nonetheless instructive for this case. ‘Comer’ corresponds to the Western, ‘cultivated’ form of eating, based on an upright posture and the movement of a small, pre-portioned quantity of food to the mouth: ‘In comer the boundary between a body’s outside and inside is readily crossed’ (van de Port and Mol, 2015: 170). ‘Chupar’, on the other hand, refers to a more familial, private practice of eating fruit, in which the fruit is opened with a stone and then the content is sucked out. This, they argue, leads to a different reality of the body: ‘In comer a body puts bits of its surroundings into its mouth; in chupar a body is, rather, accepted by, or engulfed by, its surroundings, and in its turn selectively merges with these’ (van de Port and Mol, 2015: 170).
When Sarah sips up the evaporated milk, and also when she drinks yoghurt from the container, standing up, and then wipes the leftovers from the corners of her mouth with her tongue and sleeves, her eating is more chupar than comer. When she is not at the table, with plate, cutlery and clear rules about eating, Sarah’s body in relation to food enters into an intense give-and-take with her environment, weakening the boundaries between the inner and outer world, which otherwise seem to be so clearly drawn. In contrast to the dietary practices presented above, chupar is not about controlling food as a potentially hostile outside world, but about interacting with it.
However, the third step of the analysis makes it clear that Sarah’s ‘uncultivated’ way of eating does not mean it is antisocial. On the contrary, food is a medium that allows Sarah to establish contact with the world around her, and build up a close connection mediated through the senses. This applies, in the first instance, to the relationship with other people that arises from preparing coffee for others (Punch and McIntosh, 2014: 83) or giving them sweets. It applies even more when it comes to eating together – as, for example, when Sarah gives me the ice cream. Through the ‘sharing of tastes, textures, eating practices and routines’ (Pink, 2015: 110), Sarah creates an emotional tie which only functions when mediated through the sensory experience of food. She makes this implicit aspect explicit when she points out that this is her favourite ice cream and thus a taste particularly appreciated by her individually, which I am permitted to share with her as a sensory experience at this moment.
But the connections that Sarah’s body engages in are not limited to interpersonal relationships. In accordance with a broader concept of life-itself, which does not presuppose a distinction between object and subject, but instead assumes the existence of dynamics, movements and processes of materialization (Ansell, 2009), the interaction with food can also be interpreted as a relationship. As the remarks on chupar have shown, Sarah uses food to establish contact with her surroundings: a close but somewhat chaotic contact, with no clear demarcations. Food is ambivalent, however, insofar as it is not only able to connect Sarah with her surroundings but can at the same time isolate her. This occurs, for example, when she is teased by other young people in the group because of her weight.
Conclusion: Agency and biopolitics beyond the nature/culture divide
From the perspective of nutritional science, the preceding analysis could probably be summed up quickly and simply with the assessment that Sarah’s eating behaviour is characterized by a developmental delay or a pathological disorder and that the food diary is a more or less successful attempt to cope with this problem. The theories of the body on which this article is based, however, assume multiple enactments of the body, which in turn create different realities (van de Port and Mol, 2015). On one hand, children’s bodies in residential care – in the context of a widespread obesity panic – are categorized either as appropriate or, as in Sarah’s case, too fat and are subjected to the logic of ‘biopedagogies’ (Wright, 2009), which combine aesthetic and medical norms. At the same time, bodies are not entirely reduced to these biopedagogies, but are created in different enactments, which open up alternative realities and a different kind of agency. The first case assumes an agency located in the mind, which is seen as independent of and able to control the body. The second case, however, is concerned with a social agency that arises from the specific relationship between the body and food (Eßer, 2016b).
For childhood studies, this means that we can potentially still understand children as actors, even in opposition to adult-centred models of development, without assuming an isolated and substantialist agency – a view of agency that has attracted considerable criticism both within and outside childhood studies (Eßer, 2016a; Kraftl, 2013; Oswell, 2016). An a-humanist understanding of people (Lee, 2008) allows childhood studies to take into account subjective experience, which is always affective and sensory as well, without having to postulate a classical subject, identical with itself. This means calling into question a bias in the research towards primarily visual evidence (Woodyer, 2008: 353) or verbal utterances (Spyrou, 2016) and overcoming this bias in favour of a sensory research culture (Pink, 2015). A child can then become a subject in childhood studies without having to speak to us or anyone else in the traditional sense of an authentic voice.
In terms of science and technology studies, these corporeal practices, which are only available to sensory experience, can also be understood as ‘politics’ (Law and Mol, 2008: 141): Sarah’s enjoyment, which consists in becoming one with the food, in a sensory and at the same time ‘vulgar’ pleasure, becomes something political. So does the nutrition diary, in which food means calories, not pleasure. Different and potentially competing realities are being constructed here. It can therefore be interpreted as an act of resistance when Sarah – outside the regulated mealtimes, which are recorded as such in the diary – secretly consumes high-calorie food which makes her fat. At the same time, however, Sarah is not operating outside society; she pits her natural needs against the social appropriation of her body by biopedagogies. In the terms of an a-humanist understanding, the widespread craving for sugar-rich, fatty food is the result of clever manoeuvring by big corporations, which produce large quantities of low-quality, low-price goods and focus on selling these to low-income groups (Gard, 2009: 34).
Thus, bodies are neither biologically given nor freely selectable in social terms; instead, as participants in social practices (Bollig and Kelle, 2016), they are always bio-social entities, operating within the relevant powerful relations. Seen in this light, Sarah’s eating style can be understood as an expression of agency beyond voice (Kraftl, 2013). It constitutes an alternative reality to the food diary, which is not verbalized but is shown in the solitary and shared enjoyment of food. This reality reveals a quality of food that is not limited to the relationship between calories and body weight, which often dominates talk about food. Instead, it shows an enactment of the body which is significant for Sarah, insofar as it allows her a relationship with the world that is untidy, hard to contain and at the same time intimate.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks young people – especially Sarah – and staff members for their warm welcome to Annandale. Many thanks also to Ruth Emond, Samantha Punch (both from the University of Stirling), as well as Laura Steckley (University of Strathclyde) for their helpful advice and great support.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) [grant number 806704].